an examination of a lot of things

I'll be pretty frank in saying that I didn't really enjoy this essay collection as a whole, though I can most definitely recognize how big of a deal its publication and positive reception were for the world of nonfiction writing. Jamison's intersection of impressive research, self-reflection, and meaningful questions related to the illusive concept of empathy and how we can understand and act it out is interesting as a premise. In execution, though, I got lost along the way. I can't overgeneralize the whole collection with comments about specific essays, but enough of the pieces felt like they were trying to do too many things at once for me to latch onto one solid idea of aboutness and run with that. It really is impressive to see all the different moving parts at work here, within each essay as its own little city as well as the collection as a whole, but it's just a lot. And sometimes I wanted the point Jamison was trying to make concerning empathy to be a bit clearer. This is just my personal preference when I read creative nonfiction essays, and I'm very aware of that. But some of the essay's tones felt overinflated and rose on hot air to the rafters until the general vibe turned pompous and overly academic. I started to get annoyed with how many times I had to reread sentences... But her willingness to experiment with form throughout the entire collection is admirable. The first essay, also titled "The Empathy Exams," is by far my favorite and, seeing as it was the first one I read, I expected the rest of the collection to wow me in equal measure. I can't blame the text for not meeting expectations I set and upheld, but it just continued to sour my overall reading experience. I think I might need to return to the collection for a second read and read everything slower, to give it another chance and digest all of the content crammed into its pages. But for now I'm content to end my review here.


​
Some of my favorite quotes from The Empathy Exams:

"Empathy isn't just remembering to say that must be really hard---it's figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all."

"At what volume does feeling become sentimental? How obliquely does feeling need to be rendered so it can be saved from itself?"

"We're disgusted when anything comes too easily. But also greedy."

"This is how writers fall in love: they feel complicated together and then they talk about it."

"Empathy is contagion."

"How do we represent female pain without producing a culture in which this pain has been fetishized to the point of fantasy or imperative? Fetishize: to be excessively or irrationally devoted to."

"The wounded woman gets called a stereotype and sometimes she is. But sometimes she's just true. I think the possibility of fetishizing pain is no reason to stop representing it."

---